Resource Extraction Politics and the Formation of Malayan Literary-Intellectual Thought

Abstract

This essay situates resource extraction politics in the twin formation of Malayan intellectual and literary thought as embodied by Nanyang Studies and Mahua literature. Rather than Chinese-Malayan, Sino-Malay, and sinophone Malaysian, I explore Mahua literature as Chinese-language literature from the Malay Peninsula, along the rich tin-belt stretching from Ranong and Phuket to Bangka and Belitung. I argue that its coinage was an anti-colonial response to Malaya’s export-oriented colonial economy at the height of the international tin trade during the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, I trace the intellectual origins of Nanyang Studies, not to its actual founding in Singapore in 1940, but to its founder Hsu Yun-Tsiao’s experience of the central peninsula and ports, as recounted in his Patani diaries (1933). For centuries, southern Thailand and northern Malaya experienced Chinese migration due to the tin trade, and their development under Siamese and British spheres of influence and local Malay rule can be conceived as a geohistorical unit. It was only the Anglo- Siamese treaty of 1909 that formed the present-day border between Malaysia and Thailand, and how we now conceive the national boundaries between Mahua and Taihua literatures. But the long history of the tin trade’s Phuket-Penang sea route and Patani-Perak-Kedah overland routes not only influenced the internationalist, cosmopolitan, and anti-colonial thinking of Hsu’s work, but also facilitated his recruitment to teach the descendants of Chinese laborers and capitalists in the first place. Nanyang Studies’s historical consciousness of borderlands and coastlines contains non-national strategies for intellectual decolonization within Mahua literary development.